Journal Article
Yearnings for Guácharo Cave: affect, absence, and science in Venezuelan speleology
Pérez, M.A.
Record Number:
4990
Year:
2016
Journal:
Cultural Geographies
Pages:
693-714
Volume:
23
Abstract:
As a member of Venezuela’s first national society of cave exploration and science (speleology),
Ramón Alberto Hernández (1926–2009) participated in the exploration and survey of Venezuela’s
famous Guácharo Cave in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Despite his key contributions to the
knowledge of this cave and many others in the country, his contributions have received little
attention. With an ethnographic account of his last visit to Guácharo Cave in 2008 as focus, this
article offers a glimpse into Venezuela’s geographies of science at an important historical moment
in the relation among individuals, the nation, science, and modernity. It does so from Hernández’s
vantage point, as he yearns to reach a particular point inside of the cavern, a point where his
life and the lives of other cave explorers who overshadowed his speleological contributions, the
cavern, and my own history become entangled. Building on scholarship that emphasizes absence
and hope as important aspects of experience, I focus on this yearning, this emergent, relational, and
transformative capacity that animates and constitutes not just these entangled histories and identities
but also beings and the cave itself. In the process, I illustrate the ways scientific knowledge and
national modernity are co-produced. Beyond Hernández, beyond caves, this exploration reminds
us of the need to (1) examine the ways affective attachments are formed in/with extraordinary
places and (2) widen our understanding of materiality and presence to encompass absence. Finally,
this work illustrates the centrality of yearnings in fieldwork and writing.
Keywords
absence, affect, autoethnography, caves, co-production, fieldwork, materiality, science,
speleology, Venezuela
Times Cited:
1
Relevent Species:
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